Paper Flowers

Happy Halloween, ya’ll! I hope everyone is having a good one. We hit a local trick-or-treat today and the boys already have a lot of candy loot.

For Spanish class this week I had big plans; unfortunately, Monkey had a 104F fever that thwarted – or postponed – my plans. In Mexico, instead of celebrating Halloween (though our culture has spread so that some in Mexico do celebrate Halloween) – a different holiday is celebrated (November 1st and 2nd) – The Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos. The timing could not be better for our class as we are discussing “Familia” – family. Raise your hand if that seems weird. Let me tell you why it’s not.

Although many of the symbols of Dia de los Muertos – graves, spirits, calaveras (skulls) – appear in our traditional Halloween celebrations, the Day of the Dead is not about ghosts and goblins or trick-or-treating at all. Instead, it’s about honoring your relatives that have passed on. Altars are created with the dead relatives favorite things and food, pan de muerto (bread of the dead) and flowers – real and paper. So the plan for the class, following a brief discussion of the holiday? To make paper flowers:

They were really easy to do, and fun for my boys. I still plan to do this next week for the classes. I cut out 160 pieces of 8″x8″ tissue paper, ya’ll. The instructions are:

1. Layer four or five pieces of 8″x8″ tissue paper.
2. Accordian-fold the tissue paper (for the preschool class, I pre-folded 15 of them as this was hard for Monkey to do, and I did not want to turn class into a discussion on the techniques of accordian-folding).
3. In the middle of the folded paper, cut a small V on both sides.
4. Twist pipe cleaner around the Vs, and leaving the “stem” down, pull out the tissue paper until it appears like a flower.

More information on Dia de los Muertos can be found all over the ‘net. Start here.